Warren Murphy: Sue Me

"You didn't earn your airfare, Francine," came the voice.

"I know how voices can be beamed and use metal as speakers. I looked it up after we talked the last time."

"So you know that."

"I do."

"You didn't follow instructions."

"I'd be dead if I did. The material on the plane seats was like kindling. It went right up."

"Yes, I know how those things work. Unfortunately I misjudged you. Some people are so strange. They're not as simply designed as airplanes."

"So what do you want from me?"

"I want you to forget about how you got back home, and I will forget about you."

"You would have murdered an entire planeload of people. Are you a spy?"

The voice laughed from the brass bedstand in Francine Waller's Seattle home.

"What's so funny?"

"A spy works for a government. Spies are killed by other spies. Governments don't work well at all; therefore I don't work for governments."

"Leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone," said Francine.

"I do hope that's so. You know, you disappointed me mightily."

"If living does that, I'm afraid I'm going to try to disappoint you for a long time to come."

"Remember, if your conscience gets the better of you, it's your life that's at stake."

"It's the only thing that's keeping me from the police," said Francine.

"Thanks for letting me know how you work," came the voice.

In the following days, Francine became despondent. She thought of what might have happened to her and everyone else on board. She thought of that person who might have murdered others doing it again. She even heard of a similar disaster in Mexico where more than a hundred people died in the flames of the burning jet, fueled by the seats that had not been changed despite the Seattle fire.

She read that a law firm, Palmer, Rizzuto was calling this failure to change seat material "gross negligence" of the worst sort.

"They had ample proof in Seattle that their planes were death traps and yet they did nothing. The American public cannot be subjected to such negligence by airplane manufacturers who do not care about their product once it has left the assembly line," said a spokesman for Palmer, Rizzuto "Seattle was a lesson to everyone in the world except, it seems, the manufacturers. A jury that values life must make the air safe for travel by insisting through a significant penalty that human life is more valuable than a few dollars saved on seat cushions."

But Francine Waller knew who was really responsible. She was. If she had reported what she had done, the second aircraft might not have gone up in flames.

And she couldn't live with that. She couldn't live with knowing that she could have saved lives but chose instead to keep herself comfortable. Even the new motorbike she had won in a contest she didn't remember entering failed to console her. Nothing was worth anything until she cleared her conscience.

So she took her new Yamasaki motorbike with the teardrop gas tank and the super deluxe chrome exhausts and drove it to the police station. But on the only stretch of open highway, the bike picked up speed because the throttle jammed, and the brakes failed.

Francine thought at first of jumping off, heading the bike into a tree and saving herself. At fifteen miles an hour there would be a few broken bones. But the Yamasaki was up to twenty, and then thirty-five, a killing speed on a motorbike. By the time she was at fifty, Francine Waller was holding on for her life. At eighty-five miles an hour, when she had to make the most minor turn, the bike spilled her like a bag of potatoes flying unprotected into a concrete wall.

The only thing left unbroken was her crash helmet. Her neck snapped, four ribs jammed into her heart, and her spinal cord was so badly damaged that had she lived, she wouldn't have been able to wiggle anything below her chin ever again.

But her parents were not without recourse in the death of their precious daughter. An attorney for Palmer, Rizzuto a famous Los Angeles negligence firm, said others had died in the same tragic way. They were handling the estate of a famous actor who had died on a Yamasaki just like the Wallers' daughter.

"It seems there is a retention ring on the throttle that has to be replaced or the bike in some cases just keeps on accelerating. In some cases the driver becomes a human cannonball. They are not safe machines. "

"Isn't this ambulance-chasing?" the mother asked. The young lawyer was smooth, as though he were rehearsed.

"You could call it that. And you'd be right. But look at who's doing the chasing. We're Palmer, Rizzuto and we redress the damages done by large corporations to otherwise helpless individuals. You can go to any lawyer you want. But no law firm has won as many judgments, large judgments, as we have. And I might add righteous judgments. Yamasaki knew they had problems, but they thought it was cheaper to pay off some small negligence suits than to change a design. And they will continue to operate like that if people don't make it too expensive for them to do otherwise. We don't think they should get away with it. And we don't think you should let them get away with it."

"Who are you?" asked the mother. "Palmer, Rizzuto, or Schwartz?"

"Neither, ma'am. I'm Benson, as I introduced myself. I find that many of the grieving don't even hear the name at first."

"Tell me, Mr. Benson, how many grieving homes have you entered?"

"It would be a lot fewer, ma'am, if the companies knew they had to pay more when they failed to take reasonable safeguards. "

"How many, Mr. Benson?"

"I'm afraid I've lost count."

"Do you really believe that bull you've just given me?" said Francine's mother. It was too hard to listen to nonsense when her young daughter had been taken from her so abruptly. All her illusions of a nice world had ended at Francine's grave.

"We've got this company cold. We can do the best job. We won't charge you a penny, but only do it on contingency. "

"And how much for taking the case on contingency?"

"Fifty percent."

"Isn't thirty usual?"

"We get more for you at fifty percent than you'd get at seventy percent with someone else. Palmer, Rizzuto has a record of securing judgments almost twenty percent above the national average."

"You're a damned vulture, young man. But I suppose the grieving now require vultures. All right. I agree. Make them pay for Francine."

"You won't regret it," said young Mr. Benson.

It was not a major transaction for a firm as large as Palmer, Rizzuto But it was recorded by a secretary whose job was to enter all new accounts in her computer. Strangely, it also required her to list the time and date a lawyer was sent to the stricken family, when the assignment was given, and who made it.

She never knew why this was required of her, and in a firm as large as Palmer, Rizzuto no one noticed a lowly secretary performing yet another computer function, especially since most of the employees didn't understand how the computer system worked anyway, and those who did assumed either Mr. Palmer or Mr. Rizzuto or Mr. Schwartz had asked for it.

And so Francine's death and the date and time of her mother's subsequent retention of a lawyer went into the computer. And of course, no one knew someone was taking the information out. No one knew it went into a central file and became a statistic. And this statistic would have made the young lawyer proud of his ability to sell the services of the firm.

The statistics also showed that so effective was Palmer, Rizzuto that it had put several firms into bankruptcy. It was a symptom of a national problem. America had become so litigious that some industries faced imminent collapse. In hospitals, specialties were dying because it was too expensive for doctors to bear the skyrocketing cost of malpractice insurance. Obstetrics, the bringing of babies into the world, might very well disappear as a practice in America. But it was not a crisis yet and the man looking at the statistics felt he was not sure how to cope with it.